


Stand the Distance

by lossie



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Eventual Romance, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, I Will Go Down With This Ship, Idiots in Love, Slow Build, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-10-18 09:13:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20636708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lossie/pseuds/lossie
Summary: "An easy smile lit her face as she remembered Poe’s first messages and how they made her feel. That night when they first talked she had understood what it was like to be wanted. It was the best, most cherished memory she had."





	Stand the Distance

**Author's Note:**

> Here goes nothing. Or rather here goes the Poe/Rey soulmate AU literally nobody asked for.
> 
> The plan is to wrap this story up in five chapters, but we shall see how it goes. FYI I'm really bad at predicting the length of chapters and how many of them I'll actually need for a particular plot, so we might be here a while.
> 
> This story is sort of a rewrite of TFA (and my first ever venture into the Star Wars fandom). I was trying to stay close to canon when it was possible, but some of the dialogues and scenes just don't work as well on paper as they did on screen, so it ended up diverging from the original. I hope it still makes sense in the end.
> 
> Anyway, please enjoy and let me know what you think - I love reading your comments!
> 
> Also, for those who are interested, here's one of the playlists I listened to while writing this chapter: https://youtu.be/fZsiabYq7bw  
The title comes from Bryan Adams' song "I will always return."

Rey startled as she felt the telltale prickling against her skin. She stopped what she was doing for a moment and then dragged her fingers slowly, almost reverently, against the bindings on her left arm. She was so tempted to take a quick peek underneath, just to check and make sure that something was there, but a sudden noise made her quickly ducked her head and snatch her hand away.

She desperately tried to pretend nothing happened and to conceal the sudden burst of happiness she felt from any unwanted eyes. As far as she could tell nobody had been paying attention to her, but one could never be too sure. A quick glance confirmed that she was safe this time. It wouldn’t do for anyone, least of all Unkar Plutt, to find out that she was harbouring a secret.

With a wistful sigh and one more longing glance at her covered arm, she went back to scrubbing the miscellaneous engine parts she had managed to collect this morning. Her haul was surprisingly good this time around. She had discovered an unexplored ship wreck almost a fortnight ago, but she didn’t have a chance to go back there until this morning. Thankfully it was still there, blissfully undisturbed, when she finally managed to track it down and it was also full of useable parts in very good condition. If Plutt thought they were good too, it would mean enough rations to get her through the next few days without much struggle.

The thought of food –full rations instead of the quarters she usually managed to get – made her stomach rumble loudly. She didn’t have anything to eat this morning, like most days, and her stomach was voicing some objections to the mistreatment. One of the women working near her must have heard it and snorted at her as if amused by the sound. Rey felt her face heat up in embarrassment as she doubled her focus on the task at hand. Hunger was a part of her life – part of almost everyone’s life on Jakku – but she still felt ashamed for how her body reacted to it. She didn’t want to be perceived as weak for it, because being openly vulnerable here was a one-way ticket to serious trouble.

She had to scrub for another hour or so before she was fully satisfied with her work. Plutt seemed quite happy with her as well, a thing that didn’t happen very often, and rewarded her with four full rations.

Rey couldn’t quite hold back the giddiness she felt as she scurried to her speeder with the generous haul. _Four_ full rations! She couldn’t quite believe her own luck.

She drove as quickly as the old piece of junk would go, her happiness raising steadily the closer she got to the old AT-AT walker she lived in. The journey seemed to stretch for an impossibly long time, its length probably amplified by her desire to finally be out of the open and in the relative privacy of her shelter. When she arrived, she quickly secured her speeder, grabbed the food portions, and got inside.

On a normal day she would have started with food first, but today she had a different priority.

She put the portions on her makeshift kitchen table and sat down on the floor in the most well-lit part of the walker. After a few deep breaths to steady her rapidly beating heart, she started to unwrap her left arm. When the strip of fabric was fully off, she turned her arm a bit and smiled softly at the words written across her skin in a neat cursive.

“_Hello, Sunshine_,” she read out loud, blushing at the term of endearment.

Just like she did in the junkyard when she felt the words appear, she raised her other hand and slowly touched them with her fingers as if trying to commit them to memory by this gesture alone.

Rey had been around ten when the first words showed up. They were a response to something she had absent-mindedly scribbled across her arm. Imagine her surprise when she saw words write themselves on her skin almost immediately after she put her own marker away. What followed was a somewhat confusing discussion about the mysterious ways of the Force with someone she couldn’t quite believe actually existed.

It didn’t take long to find out that her conversation partner was a young pilot named Poe. He was quite funny, very excited to know she was real, and he was apparently her soulmate. Although she knew very little about soulmates at the beginning, Poe was kind enough to explain the concept in great detail. Rey loved the idea that there was someone out there who was meant to be with her forever, even if it also filled her with trepidation.

An easy smile lit her face as she remembered Poe’s first messages and how they made her feel. That night when they first talked she had understood what it was like to be wanted. It was the best, most cherished memory she had.

Still smiling, she took a marker and quickly wrote a response, hoping that Poe would be able to talk to her for a moment wherever he was right now. Since they lived literally galaxies away and were both busy, they didn’t get a chance to talk as often as Rey would have liked.

It took a lot of restraint not to start dancing in glee when he wrote a reply to her short greeting only a few seconds later.

_Glad to finally catch you up, sweetheart!_ _How’s your day?_ He wrote and, not for the first time, she tried to imagine how it would sound if he said it to her instead. She giggled, imagining a warm, kind voice asking her so sweetly about her day. For whatever reason, it made her blush just a bit.

They continued talking for what felt like hours about whatever came to mind. Rey almost completely forgot that she was hungry in the excitement of finally catching up with her soulmate. Luckily, Poe mentioned something about eating dinner at one point and so she happily dug into her own food as he told her about missing koyo melons and his father’s cooking. Rey sometimes wondered how different was the food he talked about from what she usually ate. It was hard to imagine that something other than rations actually existed on most days, but Poe made it sound so utterly normal. She was afraid to ask for clarification on what certain things were and why he liked them over the others. She didn’t want him to think that she was stupid or something.

Even though it has been years since they started talking, their conversation topics were usually pretty general. She knew that Poe was a pilot who didn’t get to spend much time with his dad or any of his friends. He had explained that they all lived far away from where he worked. She knew that he loved koyo melons, his favourite colour was blue, and that he liked singing when no one was around to hear. In turn, she told him bits and pieces about her life, skipping all the unpleasant parts and focusing on the few relatively pleasant memories she had. He also knew what her favourite colour was and that she wanted to travel if she ever got a chance to leave Jakku.

There were some things she would never share with him.

Just like she was too scared to ask about the food, she was also afraid to tell him about her loneliness. Sometimes Rey was almost desperate enough to beg Poe to find her and take her away, but she never followed through with it, no matter how bad her situation got or how many days she went on an empty stomach. She didn’t want to be disappointed if he said no. Finding out that he didn’t care about her would have been the ultimate blow to her heart. Playing the game of pretending that everything was alright was preferable to scaring him away.

He was really her only companion, the only bright spot in her life. She didn’t want to lose him.

-0-

The next few days found Rey struggling to find anything good to trade. She counted herself very lucky for that one good haul, because otherwise she would have had nothing to eat yet again. The ships she came across were either already stripped bare of any and all good parts or didn’t have anything worth extracting to begin with. Whatever she was able to find was barely salvageable and mediocre at best. Not nearly good enough to satisfy Plutt, who was in turn particularly stringy with rations.

Rey eyed the single quarter ration he offered her as payment for the latest haul with a mix of anger and resignation.

She took it either way.

As she walked back to her speeder, clutching the ration tightly in one hand, she fought back against the sudden urge to cry. She felt the tears in the back of her throat, hot and merciless like the suns scorching the back of her neck. She knew she was stronger than this. She had survived so much over the years and it wasn’t even the first time Plutt cheated her out of food, but it stung all the same.

She somehow managed to get to the walker without breaking down. When she got there, she all but ran inside and collapsed on the floor, heavy sobs wrecking her small frame as soon as she was hidden from view. She gasped, fingers flexing against the threadbare material of her tunic, and then let go completely. For a few long moments she struggled to breathe as she cried, tears leaving smudges on her dirty face.

Once she started crying in earnest, she couldn’t stop. All the bitterness, all the pain, all the sadness falling away bit by bit with each tear until there was nothing left. It must have taken her close to an hour to finally calm down somewhat. She dried her face with her tunic, feeling completely spent and beyond exhausted.

With her throat raw from crying, she wasn’t even really hungry anymore. Still, she forced herself to go through the motions of preparing a meal and then ventured outside to eat it.

She was almost finished when she heard a series of shrill beeps. The sound was repeated a moment later and Rey sprung into action. She put away the food, quickly grabbed her quarterstaff, and ran. As she climbed over the nearest sand hill, she spotted the source of the sound immediately. It was coming from a small droid, which was trapped in a net and being dragged by a scavengers in Plutt’s employ she knew all too well.

“Oi! Let him go!” She called out to Teedo.

He scowled in response and growled something at her in his native language to which Rey responded with a pointed instruction to bugger off. While Teedo wasn’t the smartest guy out there, he knew better than to fight with her. Their last altercation didn’t end well for him and he apparently still remembered it, because he released the net a moment later.

Without paying too much attention to his angry muttering as he slowly rode away, she kneeled down and helped the happily beeping droid untangle from the rough netting. She also fixed its antenna, which must have been bent while he struggled to escape on his own.

“Here you go. As good as new.”

The droid thanked her and then rolled slightly to the side, looking after the departing scavenger with what she could only describe as slight apprehension.

“Don’t mind him. It’s just Teedo. He wanted you for parts,” she explained.

It beeped at her in alarm and she snorted. “No, I won’t be doing that. I have some respect for good tech, you know.”

At those words, the little guy trilled in excitement before proceeding to roll around her in celebration as if the fact that she wasn’t a complete barbarian was actually worth a round of applause.

Rey couldn’t help laughing at his antics, wondering who in their right mind would leave something so adorable to fend for itself in the middle of nowhere on Jakku. The planet wasn’t a safe place for anyone or anything at the best of times.

“How did you end up here?” She asked the droid as it finally stopped its happy dance and parked in front of her.

Its response was immediate.

“Classified, really? Me too, big secret.”

An indignant series of beeps informed her that she wasn’t being very nice.

“Well, you’re being all secretive. I can be that too,” she said with a shrug. “Can you at least tell me your name?”

This actually garnered a response she could work with. “Beebe-Ate, huh? I’m Rey. Nice to meet you.”

BB-8 responded with the binary equivalent of “you too”.

Rey smiled, petting the droid gently on its head. Even though she didn’t plan to do it at the beginning, she was seriously considering taking the little guy with her. BB-8’s owner would probably appreciate if the droid didn’t end up maimed by some desert creature or lost in the sinking sands either way.

“Do you want to come with me?” She asked after a moment of consideration. “I can take you to the Niima Outpost in the morning. Whoever lost you will have an easier time finding you there.”

Unsurprisingly, the droid agreed and readily followed as she led it to the walker.

“Can you tell me who are you waiting for? Or is it classified too?”

BB-8 gave her what she was pretty sure was a robot equivalent of an eye roll, but it still answered her question.

It took her a few seconds to properly process what it said before the words finally fully registered.

“Your master’s name is Poe?” She parroted, feeling suddenly breathless.

The droid beeped at her happily in binary, repeating that yes, his master’s name was indeed Poe, and Rey felt her whole world tilt on its axis. The odds that this droid truly belonged to _her_ Poe were slim to none and she knew the assumption was as ridiculous as it was far-fetched, but she couldn’t help but hope that it was true.

“I know a Poe too, you know,” she said quietly, touching her left arm rather self-consciously.

BB-8 beeped excitedly in response.

“Oh, I don’t know if it’s the same one.” She smiled, feeling only slightly stupid for doing so. “I think there might be more than one Poe in the galaxy.”

Her new companion was quiet for a while before he beeped shortly in what she understood as reluctant acknowledgement.

They remained quiet for the rest of the evening. Rey finished the last bites of her meal and got ready for bed. She somehow managed to manoeuvre BB-8 inside the walker, so she could keep the little guy out of harm’s way until morning. She even put together an improvised charging unit from the one she usually used for her speeder, hoping it would do at least a half-decent job of resorting the droid’s energy.

She was almost asleep when BB-8 asked her one more question.

“Sorry, Beebee, but he’s away now. I can ask him if he’s friends with a very talkative droid when he gets back though.”

For a reason she didn’t quite want to examine too closely, she really hoped Poe’s answer would be yes.

-0-

Plutt dumped the whole container of rations on the counter, his expression expectant.

Sixty rations. Sixty _full_ rations.

Rey couldn’t quite believe her eyes as she stared at the literal mountain of food placed on full display right in front of her. It was more than what she has ever seen in her life and Plutt was offering it to her for one droid. Wrapping her head around this situation was impossible.

Everyone seemed to be holding their breath as they waited for her decision. She was very tempted to agree to Plutt’s terms, but in the end she couldn’t bring herself to do it. No amount of food was truly worth giving up a possible connection to her soulmate and she liked BB-8 enough to save him from her employer’s greedy hands.

“The droid’s not for sale,” she muttered as she snatched the quarter portion Plutt had originally offered for her haul and then stalked away with the little droid rolling quickly after her.

She was almost fuming with anger as she made a beeline for her speeder, determined to just go back to the walker and forget this day happened. She didn’t get very far before some of the other scavengers ambushed her. In hindsight, she really should have expected it. To her knowledge Plutt has never offered anyone this many rations. It was easy to understand why anyone would want to take the droid away from her, even if it meant literally fighting her for it. Plus she had absolutely no doubt that her employer could and would scoop low enough to actually order his goons to take BB-8 from her after being so blatantly refused.

No property was considered sacred on Jakku.

Luckily, Rey was used to protecting herself. She managed to defeat the three assailants, smashing her staff against the third guy’s skull with a bit more ferocity than was probably strictly necessary. She could only hope it would make him think twice before attacking her ever again.

“You alright, Beebee-Ate?” She asked the droid as she took off the piece of filthy fabric that had been used to cover him up.

The droid responded in affirmative and Rey breathed a sigh of relief.

However, it was at this moment that BB-8 spotted a man who was standing a few yards away from them. He was apparently wearing his master’s jacket, but was not, in fact, his master. Rey’s eyes narrowed dangerously before she charged at the man who started screaming and running away the moment he realized she was after him. She caught up to him easily and knocked him down without much trouble.

“What’s your hurry, thief?”

“Thief?! What the kriff...!” The man yelled at her.

BB-8 chose this moment to zap the guy, making him scream bloody murder.

“The jacket. This droid says you stole it.”

The man looked very offended at the suggestion.

“I had a pretty messed-up day, so I would appreciate it if you stopped accusing me of-aaaa!” The man jumped when BB-8 zapped him again. “Could just stop it?!”

“Where did you get it then?” She asked, narrowing her eyes in suspicion.”It belongs to Beebee’s master.”

Something shifted on the man’s face at those words. He looked between her and the droid a few time before sighing heavily and closing his eyes.

“It belonged to Poe Dameron. That’s his name, right?” He said, directing the question to BB-8 who beeped in agreement.

After another moment of silence and an even deeper sigh, the man explained what happened prior to his arrival in the Niima Outpost. Apparently BB-8’s master had been captured by the First Order and the man in front of her helped him escape, but they crashed in the desert.

Poe.

Poe Dameron.

Poe Dameron, the Resistance pilot, who could have been _her_ Poe.

“Where is he now?” she asked, her own voice sounding almost foreign to her ears.

She knew the answer even before the man said, “He didn’t make it.”


End file.
